


The Greatest Sandwich in the Universe

by sans_patronymic



Series: A Second Honeymoon [2]
Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: Companionable Snark, F/M, Fluff and Humor, IN SPACE!, Vacation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:47:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26225164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sans_patronymic/pseuds/sans_patronymic
Summary: In which Bulma gets cabin fever and Vegeta satisfies a craving.A few years after Bulla's birth, Bulma and Vegeta decide to take a much-belated honeymoon--in space!
Relationships: Bulma Briefs/Vegeta
Series: A Second Honeymoon [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1904647
Comments: 24
Kudos: 67





	1. Chapter 1

They were three days into their vacation and approximately seventeen parsecs from the Earth when Bulma realized she had forgotten something. An inalienable and terribly important fact. Space, she suddenly remembered, was fucking _boring_.

Not a mild, ignorable sort of boring, like television commercials or a meeting which really could have been an email. Space was boring in an utter, mind-melting sort of way. Like being on hold for hours only to have a robotic little voice announce ‘our office is now closed, please try your call again later’ before the line goes dead. A deep, madness-inducing sort of boring.

At first, she had enjoyed the break. She and Vegeta spent twenty out of the first twenty-four hours in bed, alternately dozing and making love with the kind of reckless abandon that came with the certainty there would be no interruptions—no children knocking on the door, no urgent phone calls.

There had been a novelty to the malaise of watching the stars blur together, or the rising and setting of a nebula as they sped past. Now, however, Bulma felt trapped by the insurmountable _nothing_ out the windows. Her mind, used to the constant race of work and motherhood, rebelled at stagnation. What was meant to be a relaxing holiday was mutating into a prison sentence.

“Maybe I should have brought my laptop after all,” she mumbled.

“Mm.” said Vegeta, only half-listening.

They were sitting on the couch in the ship’s lounge, Vegeta’s legs draped across her lap. Bulma looked past them to the dirty dishes which covered the coffee table. On the television, a movie that had been billed as a ‘spellbinding mystery’ utterly failed to keep her attention.

“If I had my laptop, I’d be able to go through those balance sheets Finance sent over without having to get up.”

“I thought we agreed this wouldn’t be a working vacation.”

“No, I know,” Bulma said, huffing out a sigh. “But I am so bored I think I’d actually enjoy reviewing the third quarter earnings reports.”

“Tch.”

“I’m serious. How much longer til we get there?”

“Another thirty-six hours or so.”

“Ugghhh.”

“You’ll be fine,” Vegeta declared, his eyes still fixed on the TV. “How does the sign in your mother’s kitchen put it—’It’s not the destination; it’s the journey’?”

“Fuck you,” she said, giving his thigh a half-hearted slap. “Doesn’t this get to you? I feel like normally you can’t sit through a two hour movie without getting antsy. How are you _this_ zen about being inside for days?”

“Old habits, you could say. I once spent a year in a glorified armchair, remember? This is, comparatively, a very brief trip in very luxurious accommodations.”

Bulma rolled her eyes. “The space pod doesn’t count. Weren’t you in suspended animation or a cryogenic deep-freeze or something?”

“Not exactly.”

He stretched his arms overhead, his back arching, mouth gaping wide in a yawn. Bulma couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him look so relaxed. Zen didn’t even begin to describe it. For a man who spent most of his time on Earth pacing around like a tiger in a too-small cage, Vegeta seemed contented as a house cat in the ship’s cramped and austere living quarters. He folded his hands across his chest and turned away from the screen to look at her. He blinked at her three times, then frowned.

“What?”

“I’m thinking,” he answered.

“Oh, no wonder you look so strained.”

“Ha-ha.” Vegeta pulled his legs from across her lap, sat up, and reached for the remote. The television screen went black, the not-so-spellbinding mystery vanishing with an electronic hiss. “Do you want to hear my idea or not?”

“Sure. What’s your idea?”

—

In the control room, Vegeta stood hunched over the navigation computer. Numbers streamed across one monitor. On another, a bold font announced: ’TABULATING . . .’, its little ellipsis blinking on and off with determined slowness.

He drummed his fingers along the console. “It’s around here somewhere, I know it is.”

“So, what kind of a restaurant is this place?” Bulma asked from the comfort of the command chair. She kicked out her foot to set the chair spinning in time with the computer’s blips.

“I wouldn’t call it a ‘restaurant’, exactly… Certainly not like those white table cloth places that serve you the universe’s smallest steak and call it a meal. It’s like—what’s that place by your sister’s?”

“Which place?”

“The one with the big red creature on it. Only serves those greasy little sausages. What’s that called?”

“The Weenie Hut?”

“Yes! The Weenie Hut.”

When she stopped the chair, the room kept spinning for a moment. She waited for it to finish before she asked, with as much indignity as should could muster: “So, you’re saying _the_ best sandwich you’ve _ever_ eaten and that I absolutely _must_ try comes from an intergalactic hot dog cart?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t know why, but when Vegeta had suggested they stop somewhere for dinner, she’d expected something a little more glamorous. Somewhere with dilithium crystal glasses and an immaculate view of a supernova. Not the alien version of drive-thru.

A little sonic ping announced the computer had finished its digital number crunching. On screen, a set of coordinates appeared beside the word ‘DESTINATION:’. Vegeta’s lips curled into triumphant smirk.

“By the way,” Bulma mused, “Do we need, like… space dollars or something? How do you pay for stuff?”

“Time.”

“Huh?”

“They charge you a few minutes off your life,” Vegeta said, matter-of-factly, not bothering to look up from the navigation screen.

Bulma scoffed. “And how do they do that exactly?”

“I’ve never had it properly explained to me—something to do with telomeres. You enter through an irradiated chamber that supposedly strips time off your genome. Whatever it is they collect is used for making anti-aging creams and the like.”

“You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

“It’s completely painless,” he assured her. “And once you’re in, you can eat as much as you’d like. Quite a bargain, really—at least for me.”

Bulma shook her head in disbelief. “I’m sorry… you take minutes off your _life_ for a… a _sandwich_?”

“Listen, it’s one hell of a sandwich.”


	2. Chapter 2

The entrance to the place was a surprisingly sterile and ordinary hall. Nondescript white walls met nondescript white floors and ceiling at perfectly nondescript right angles. There was nothing to suggest that on one end was a space port filled with interstellar crafts and on the other, the alleged Greatest Sandwich. Nothing, that is, except for the hodgepodge of bizarre creatures who were forming an orderly queue along its length.

“Wow,” said Bulma, “is it always this crowded?”

A creature with too many eyes and not enough limbs turned around and gurgled, “Time machine’s broken.”

“Huh?”

“The thing that charges you,” Vegeta mumbled and when Bulma only looked more confused, added, “The _machine_. That collects your _time_. Remember, I said it costs five minutes off your life expectancy to get in?”

“Seven,” chirped someone from behind.

“Oh shit, it went up?” Vegeta asked.

Too Many Eyes nodded. “Went up a while ago.”

Bulma wondered if the niggling sense of un-belonging in the pit of her stomach was the same feeling that made Vegeta hate the mall.

Then, there was a bright flash of light accompanied by a short, crackling sound. 

“Okay, next, step down!” a voice from the front of the line called.

The line trudged forward with a collective sigh of relief. They moved along at regular intervals after that, guided by a shout of ‘next!’. As the end of the hallway drew nearer, the source of the shouts came into view—a short, squat alien, whose scaly skin, Bulma thought, uncannily matched the color of boxed mac and cheese. He waved customers through a set of automatic doors with the detached air of a veteran grocery clerk.

“Next, step down,” he barked and Too Many Eyes slipped between the doors. The doors closed. Light seeped around the edges of the doorway as a mechanical whirring chimed in.

“Hey, so,” Bulma started, trying not to sound nervous, “if this thing breaks, it’s not gonna, like… take fifty years off my life or anything, right?”

Vegeta shook his head. “No, no. …Probably not.”

“ _Probably_?”

The doors opened again. There was no sign of Too Many Eyes in the chamber ahead. The alien at controls waved her forward.

“Next.”

“You’ll be fine. Just stand still and wait for the other doors to open.”

“Yeah, but—“

“Next!” the yellowy-orange creature repeated.

“Hey, keep it moving!” someone slurped.

“Yeah, what’s the hold up? Some of us are starvin’ back here!”

“I’ll go first, if you want me to,” Vegeta offered.

“No, I—“

She looked nervously from her husband’s face to the chamber ahead and back again. The line behind them was undulating with frustration. Heads and eye stalks were craning to see what was causing the delay. Bulma’s stomach lurched. This was the fancy new salad place all over again, only this time she was the one overwhelmed by twelve different dressing options. She took a deep breath and stepped through the doors.

—

Vegeta always seemed most natural when he was eating. Less guarded. Relaxed. It was one of the few times Bulma could see any sort of special resemblance between him and Goku. Not that Vegeta’s table manners were that bad, but there was something about about seeing a man unknowingly drip sauce down the front of his shirt that made him seem more—for lack of a better word— _human_.

“Shit,” Vegeta mumbled, blotting at the yellow sludge on his chest with a napkin.

She took another bite to keep herself from laughing. “Okay,” she said, mouth half-full. “This is a really good sandwich.”

“Told you.”

“The only thing is, the texture’s kinda weird. Like, the outside is sort of crumbly and the inside is sort of crunchy and the sauce is sort of…” She licked her fingers clear, searching for the word.

“Squeaky?”

“Yeah, squeaky.”

With a nod, Vegeta unwrapped yet another sandwich, his finger tips sinking into the pebbly outer layer. Bulma couldn’t say how many he’d already eaten; she’d lost count after the first two dozen. He’d slowed down a little since then, but didn’t show signs of stopping any time soon.

She leaned her elbows on the metal table between them and looked up at the curved ceiling of the dining area. It was lined with screens displaying a panorama of stars, almost creating the illusion of a great glass dome. Like the rest of the place, it’d seen better days; a few of the screens were damaged, lines of bright red, blue and green streaking through the images while others showed nothing but grey static.

The dining area was larger than she’d expected—nearly an acre, scattered with tables and benches. The walls and floor were the same bland color as the entryway had been and with the screens overhead, it rather gave the impression of a high school cafeteria that desperately wished it was a picnic area. 

In spite of the line outside, the place didn’t seem crowded. Customers of all sorts and shapes and anatomies sat huddled in chatty groups, or quiet pairs. Against the far wall, a furry orb was sipping something through a tube, deeply absorbed in its tablet.

She turned back to Vegeta and asked, “Did you come here a lot?”

For some reason, it was hard to imagine Prince Vegeta, scourge of the galaxy, peaceably chowing down in a place like this.

“Well, not _this_ location,” he said.

“There’s more than one? Is it like a chain?”

He tossed his head side to side. “Not exactly. There’s two in the inner galactic ring and one that’s sort of half way between ring one and ring two—that’s usually the one we’d go to. We were stationed on Freeza Twenty-seven for about five or six years and that’s right on the outer edge of ring one. So, if your target’s in ring two, then it’s sort of on your way home, so to speak. The inner galactic ones are a lot nicer than this. Or they _were_ twenty years ago. Who knows now. Maybe everything has that shitty, outer-spiral-arm look these days.”

“‘Shitty outer-spiral-arm look’?”

“No offense.”

Bulma scoffed. “So, what—are you saying the Earth is in a ‘bad neighborhood’ or something?”

“No. It’s just in the middle of fucking nowhere,” Vegeta answered matter-of-factly.

She scoffed again, louder this time, and folded her arms across her chest. He rolled his eyes at her dramatics and started on yet another sandwich.

“Bulma, it took us three days to get _here_. And it’s still another thirty-something hours to the nearest planet I would consider civilized.”

“That’s rich coming from a man with sauce all over his chin.”

Vegeta wiped his chin with the back of one hand and frowned at the yellow smear. “Fuck.”

“Yeah, it’s like, _all_ over.”

“Dammit.”

“Here,” she said, tossing a handful of napkins to him and rose.

“Where are you going?”

“You clean up, I’m gonna go check out that time machine. Maybe I can figure out how it works…”

“Bulma—“

“Eat your sandwich. I’ll be fine!” She gave him a half-wave and started back towards the entrance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ran a little longer than I thought it would--whoops! Stay tuned for the accidental third chapter. :)


End file.
